Monday, April 27, 2009

GC, man about town

The people that run this shop seem to be east African Sikhs. They burn fragrant incense within their shop and keep their beards and moustaches safe by wearing tiny nets.

As well as the normal more-than-a-pound shop fare of buckets, bath plugs, really hideous plastic flowers and toilet brushes with a kind of oily blue fluid within the transparent part of the brushholder which holds the shitty end of the brush, and fake fish and fishtank seaweed, so that, having scrubbed a skid mark off your loo-pan you can pretend you're a like decadent sultan who insists on plunging his shitty loo brush into a tank of ravenous coprophagic tropical fish, they also sell brand name products, for instance, Colgate toothpaste, which tastes oddly salty and not a bit like Colgate toothpaste should and, when you read the small print on the back of tube, turns out to be actually the Federal Republic of Nigeria's rendition of Colgate toothpaste.

The men in these shops, they call me "Boss" – because I am so.

W12 can support seven types of shop:

More-than-a-pound Shops

Generic Halal Chicken outlets (at the north end of my road I have Chicken Shack to the south Tennessee Fried Chicken)

If you try to open any other kind of shop in W12 it will close within four months, and, after lying derelict for three months, be replaced by one of the above. Shops the economy of Shepherds Bush cannot sustain include:

Book shops

Chichi deli cafes

Record Shops

The Westfield

Video Shops

The Blockbuster Video at the end of my road has recently closed, leaving its huge ugly Blockbuster sign. It's not very often that you encounter three foot high architectural type that could feasibly be altered to include the word "Bolockbuter".

I would say it was a very rare occurrence.

Anyway, I'd thought maybe of angling this one round to the importance of branding or the opposite but it realised it would just be futile either way.

I think it's safe to say that no-one in Shepherds Bush gives two shits about branding, and who am I to buck the trend?